Part IV - Interviewing Past Presidents

An interview with Woodrow Wilson on a dangerous "power."

In this continuing series, I finish an interview with President Kennedy on tax policy and am introduced to President Wilson regarding a dangerous "power" that is believed to exist in the United States. Here is the end of the previous interview as I am handed over to President Woodrow Wilson.

Author: I am afraid that there is an entirely different view of what good tax policy is, now in 2010. It is like there is some force moving the nation in ways that are unseen. Do you have any thoughts on that?President Kennedy: Oh I most definitely do but, they go back before I was President. I believe, that even as far back as the founding of our nation, there were forces at work that intended to undermine the system of government we had created. But, let me introduce you to President Woodrow Wilson who actually addressed this issue in a book he wrote, "The New Freedom."

President Wilson. This is a friend of mine, Mr. Jan Burr (boy, Presidents sure seem formal) from the future, 2010, to be exact and I wanted you to tell him about your concerns of hidden forces that exert pressure on our nation and its businesses and government.

Pres. Wilson: It is a pleasure to meet someone from the future that is interested in the history of this nation and the mistakes that have led to the problems you face in 2010. How may I help you?Author: Well, I read that you thought there was something almost sinister going on when you were President. I would like to know more of what you thought was going on.Pres. Wilson: Well, probably, what wold be best would be for me to simply share with you what I thought and included in my book, "The new Freedom."Author: Please do so, sir.

Pres. Wilson:

Since I entered politics, I chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, were afraid of somebody, were afraid of something.

They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.

Author: These men of whom you speak, that are so afraid, there has to be more to why they feel this way.

President Wilson:

They know that America is not a place of which it can be said, as it used to be, that a man may choose his own calling and pursue it just as far as his abilities enable him to pursue it; because to-day, if he enters certain fields, there are organizations which will use means against him that will prevent his building up a business which they do not want to have built up; organizations that will see to it that the ground is cut from under him and the markets shut against him. For if he begins to sell to certain retail dealers, to any retail dealers, the monopoly will refuse to sell to those dealers, and those dealers, afraid, will not buy the new man's wares.

Author: This fear you mention, is nothing like what I was taught America was to be.

President Wilson: You are correct, Mr. Burr.

This is the country which has lifted to the admiration of the world its ideals of absolutely free opportunity, where no man is supposed to be under any limitation except the limitations of his character and of his mind; where there is supposed to be no distinction of class, no distinction of blood, no distinction of social status, but where men win or lose on their merits.

Author: This must make you feel very sad, doesn't it.

President Wilson:

I lay it very close to my own conscience as a public man whether we can any longer stand at our doors and welcome all newcomers upon those terms. American industry is not free, as once it was free; American enterprise is not free; the man with only a little capital is finding it harder to get into the field, more and more impossible to compete with the big fellow. Why? Because the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak.

The Project Gutenberg E-Book of The New Freedom, by Woodrow WilsonAuthor: Mr. President. If you are correct, and I believe you are, then our nation has become even more threatened by that "power" than when you first wrote of it. I also believe that you may have inavertently increased the power you speak of by signing into law, the Federal Reserve Act and creating a private corporation to be our central bank. I would like your views of Central Banking.

Pres. Wilson: Well, Mr Burr, maybe it would be better to speak to one of our Presidents who had such strong views on this subject that he got one of the three central banks the United States has had, removed. President (Andrew)Jackson, could you step over here for a moment (in a whisper, "we still call him ol' Hickory), . This is a friend of our nation, Mr. Jan Burr, from the future, 2010, who has some questions about central banking.

Author's note:The words of the Presidents in quotes are their actual words from the site listed below their comments. I have placed some of their comments in bold as I believe they focus on some key points they are making. I have written this as I did, to show how little has really changed. Human nature is such that the people of nations, seem to keep making the same mistakes they have made before or that other nations have made before. Some of our greatest leaders saw these reoccurring mistakes and attempted to remedy them only to see future generations "overrule" their wisdom and make the mistakes anyway.

What I learned from the Interview

President Wilson's words seem to echo the "conspiracy theories" that we have had for many, many decades. While there certainly may be "conspiracies," the bulk of the damage, I believe, has been done due to group think. If you take the organizations that the banking elite have had a hand in creating, CFR, Bilderbergs, Trilateral Commission, World Bank, IMF, BIS, etc., you will often find that people that rise to the top are only those who already think and believe, like the top.

In these organizations, if you are not a part of the "group think" and you challenge the economic, monetary, and tax policies they believe in, then chances are, you will not only not be moved up in the organization but, regarded as a crackpot. Take the CFR which so many of our cabinet appointments come from. There are two levels to that organization and the people are diverse in their thinking but, the top level is "by invitation" and thus, if you aren't considered to be able to fit in with those already in the upper tier, you won't be invited. That adds risk that the CFR's top level will be easily susceptible to "group think." It is what happens in many corporations when the top of that corporation only appoints "yes men."

One thing I found particular disturbing was a speech given by Hillary Clinton when the CFR opened a new facility in Washington, D.C. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton had this to say in the opening lines of that speech.

I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future.

Richard just gave what could be described as a mini-version of my remarks in talking about the issues that confront us. But I look out at this audience filled with not only many friends and colleagues, but people who have served in prior administrations. And so there is never a time when the in-box is not full.

Why did we appoint somebody that needs to be told what to do and how to think? But what drives the CFR and what is the force that President Wilson speaks of? How about "the banking elite."

Baron Nathan Mayer de Rothschild, as he now called himself, reigned as the supreme financial power in London. He arrogantly exclaimed, during a party in his mansion, "I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply."

Remember that the main reason we had a revolutionary war was because the central bank and the advice it gave England, bankrupted England. To try and pay for the mistakes it had made, it tried to get the colonies to foot the bill. Since we were small and unorganized but, wealthy in resources, it seemed like the easy way out for England. We know how wrong they were about that.

Now, however, we are the nation that is bankrupt as the GAO says we now owe more as a nation than we own. The advice we have gotten for almost 100 years has led us down a path that we now see no way out of without a depression and total reform of our economic, monetary and tax policies.

Men with good intentions, some the very best of intentions, have been convinced that debt spending in corporations, individuals and governments could allow growth that exceeded what could normally come from a society that based its growth on the slower process of saving, investing and reinvesting the earnings on that growth. I don't find fault with debt based spending as long as the return is greater than the cost of that debt. In other words, if you get a loan for 8%, then you should get a return that pays that cost and exceeds that cost so that you have "earnings" you can invest instead of using inflation to make it appear to be a sound decision. This chart from the think tank LEAP/E2020 shows the Diminishing marginal productivity of debt in the US economy (1966 to 2010).

We, as a nation have used inflation to hide the risks of debt. We have been taught that inflation would mean paying back debts with lower valued dollars (not good for you if you are the lender) and the rising price of assets would cover up defaults. In other words, if out of $100,000, in loans over a period of time, there were 10% defaults but, a 12% devaluation in dollars and thus, 12% increase in price of the collateral, it still looked like the loans given made money, even though buying power was lost. According to the article from LEAP, we are now losing 40 cents on each dollar we borrow. We started borrowing $1 or each $1 of GDP growth in the 1960's. As you can see in that chart, all that we have done is create another unsustainable situation for our nation's fiscal health.

We have not had an "economic recovery" for decades. We have had "economic improvements," not "recoveries" as that chart shows. Lower lows and lower highs are not "recoveries." We didn't even get back to the previous high. Each time we pulled spending, we sowed the seeds for the next recession.

Again, good intentions (growth with perceived, low risk, that exceeds normal growth) that actually cost us buying power and added risk to the long term economic health of the nation. President Wilson didn't refer to any conspiracy but to a "power" that men feared. Well, bad advice, given and accepted for decades becomes a power that should be feared. Whether there was a conspiracy behind the advice or not, we have accepted the advice and used it. Now, we are a bankrupt nation that consumes all its tax revenues with three departments and has to borrow to send aid to Haiti, to pay unemployment taxes, and to pay interest on our debt.

This is what David Rockefeller stated in his memoirs

HEAVY WEIGHT IN THE REALM OF GLOBALISTS.

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

David Rockefeller Baden-Baden, Germany 1991In his book Memoirs, published in 2002, David Rockefeller, Sr. made the following remarks, startling in their very frankness: "For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure -- one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."

I have met many people in my 67 years on this earth that were the nicest people you could want to live near. They were good neighbors or members of the community but, their good intentions often were misdirected or based on flawed theories. They sometimes thought their own successes in life, meant they were qualified to tell everyone else what was best for them and how they should live. However, some really scared me because they so believed in their own ideas for the community, state, or nation, that they believed the ends justified any means of reaching those ends. Even if people had to suffer, they believed the "goals" justified the suffering and that once the goals were reached, all would be well.

That can become a huge force in politics. If you have group think based on flawed economic and monetary and tax policy, you can literally destroy a nation and that is exactly what I believe is happening to this nation and what the force is that is causing that destruction.